


A Resurrection of Whales, and Other Omens of Varying Goodness

by Margo_Kim



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angels, Blend of book and TV canon, Demons, Footnotes, Gen, Heaven & Hell, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-29
Packaged: 2020-06-23 13:31:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19702375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: After the end of the world doesn't end anything, Heaven and Hell send replacements to Earth while the old representatives try to figure out their new normal.





	1. An Introduction and a Philosophical Argument of Dubious Anatomy

The woman currently standing on the street outside a used bookshop situated in an unfortunately popular part of London looked, from most angles anyway, like a stern Victorian governess’s stern Victorian governess. She wore skirts that nuns would have thought on the conservative side. Anything could have been under there, and no one could be sure exactly what as she managed to walk without ever showing her feet. That combined with her terrible smoothness of gait gave her the odd appearance of gliding down the pavement. People tended to move out of her way. Those who didn’t were moved, usually with a jab from the umbrella she always carried which was as long as a cane and had the unnerving tendency to start smoking when she got upset. One of her eyes was gold and one was purple, but she could never remember which one was which.

Depending on your perspective, Zazarael was either exactly as ancient as every angel and demon in existence[1] or about two days old.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about the Earth yet. She’d helped build it a few millennia back, but after that there’d always been too much going on in the office to pop down for a visit. Besides, they frowned on that sort of things in headquarters. Visiting Earth, she meant. There was an unspoken assumption that if you were doing your job running it right, you never actually had to go down and _check._

Zazarael had never liked that reasoning, but she obeyed it. She was, after all, an angel, and up until a week ago, that had meant something. For starters, it meant not liking or disliking things. Existence just _was_. If you couldn’t accept that, you acted as if you did which was the same thing in the long run.

Angels, it must be said, are exclusively about the long run.

That was before Armageddon, of course. Armageddon had changed everything, which had been expected. The problem was, it hadn’t changed the everything they had been expecting to change. It was supposed to be the Earth thrown into chaos (and of course divine glory, but admittedly, that came after all the chaos was done). Instead, Earth puttered on the same as before, and home office couldn’t function. The only thing trickier than assembling an army is dissembling it unused. Then there was all the work everyone had put off because, well, no point checking pH levels of the oceans if they were about to boil.

And then there was all the vacation time to deal with. Angels had worked very hard for a very long time with the assurance of their own day of rest on the other side. The angels would have worked either way, of course, but management had made the promise anyway. Gabriel had seemed almost drunk on the prospect of the upcoming victory. He called them all good sports. He clasped shoulders. He grinned. Rather too much, if Zazarael could be honest. He’d promised, and she’d listened. She’d never had a vacation before. Her idea of it looked a lot like work except Gabriel wasn’t there.

She had hoped, her wings fluttering with an unbecoming excitement, that she might finally get a chance to answer human prayers. [2]

Then the world hadn’t ended. Armory had asked for the swords back. Zazarael took off her helmet, which had been too large anyway, and got back to work. There was an awful couple days of catchup. The angels had perhaps indulged in some uncharacteristic laziness in the Final Days. Some of the more junior guardians suggested, also with uncharacteristic bitterness, that the cancellation of Armageddon had been divine punishment for slacking off. They’d all just have to work harder next time.

Zazarael was working through her backlog[3] when Michael pulled her into her office. Michael was looking unusually peaky, as she had since the end of the world hadn’t. “We need a new agent on Earth,” she said tersely.

“What about Aziraphale?” Zazarael did not ask. As a rule, angels aren’t stupid.

“Why me?” Zazarael didn’t ask either. As a rule, angels aren’t supposed to be curious either. And Zazarael, at this particularly tense moment in angelic history, wished very hard to appear to be the best angel possible.

“I am happy to serve,” was what she did say, and in addition to being a good stock phrase for an angel, it was also true. She’d never lied before and wasn’t sure how.[4]

Michael nodded distractedly. “We’ll send more down soon when the situation…settles. You can all keep an eye on each other. And we’ll keep an eye as well. A close one. Very close.”

“Of course,” said Zazarael, who’d never been alone or unwatched once in her entire existence. In heaven the smallest unit of angel is legion. “When shall I depart?”

Michael gave her a prompt answer.

The manner in which angels leave heaven is the same whether you’re defecting or transferring: a long fall and a sudden stop. If Zazarael had ever seen a cartoon, she might have recognized something of them in her sudden exit. There was solid ground under her. And then, unfortunately, she noticed there wasn’t.

A moment later, she hobbled out of a fresh crater. Well, sort of a crater. She’d streaked through the sky and landed in Florida, the United States, into a sort of swampy marsh. A pair of plastic mouse ears tried to bob by, but the water was too thick for that. They could only just manage to glug. It’s hard for any physical form to do much to the glurpiest parts of a swamp, but Zazarael’s first corporeal moments had tried their best. When she staggered free of the muck (some of which was the poor alligator that had broken her fall), she miracled herself clean. She’d never been dirty before, and had decided she didn’t like it. By extension, she’d never been clean before, and hadn’t known that was the state she preferred. Up until now, she’d only just _been._ She wasn’t sure if she was allowed to prefer one. Home office hadn’t told her what opinion to have about hygiene. It never occurred to any of the archangels to think about it.[5]

She arose from the swamp and walked to the city. She passed a bus with an airbrushed wizard on the side, and several closed down bowling alleys, and a child’s bike thrown into a tree, and billboards of women in bikinis holding machine guns. She passed roadside firework stands, and several turtles who were moving exactly as damn fast as they pleased to, and several corvids eating a turtle who had not moved fast enough. She stopped to study more alligators, these ones still intact. She discovered neon. And she thought what no mortal being entering Orlando, Florida, has ever thought: This must be the most beautiful place in the universe. 

Unfortunately, she couldn’t stay. The kingdom of heaven was all around, but the particular servant of it that she sought was limited to a specific location. London, England, to be as precise as she could at the time. Zazarael figured it would be a day’s walk.

She was wrong, of course. By nearly a day.

And now we’re back where we began, a celestial figure standing outside an unassuming used bookstore. It was designed to be as unremarkable as possible. The only thing a passerby might notice about it was how unlikely it seemed that it could pay its bills. Occasionally the determined customer got in[6], but even they tried as quickly as possible to get back out. It wasn’t dilapidated exactly, and it wasn’t quite shabby. The overwhelming feeling of the store was one of privacy. Walking in felt like you’d stumbled into someone’s bedroom, and not even in a salacious way. More like looking for a pair of socks only to discovering you’re going through your grandmother’s underwear drawer.

Zazarael didn’t notice this and wouldn’t have cared if she did. The store didn’t interest her as much as the black Bentley parked on the curb across the street. Zazarael walked over to it, opened the passenger door[7], and took a seat. The inside smelled like wickedness, which is to say leather. But there was something else underneath it and beside it and up on top of it and twined sinuously throughout it: Love. Quite a lot of Love.

This was the place.

And with the celestial patience of someone who’d spent the last 500 years answering the prayers of _E. coli_ , she waited.

“S’eggs,” Crowley insisted.

Aziraphale frowned like a man having difficulty coordinating his face. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“They’re birds, aren’t they?” Crowley said, as confident as he was incorrect. “Why wouldn’t they lay eggs?”

“Bats’re mammals, my dear.”

“Yeah but they’ve got wings.” Crowley fluttered his hand to demonstrate. He lost quite a lot of his wine in the process.

“We’ve got wings,” Aziraphale pointed out.

Crowley raised his eyebrows well above his sunglasses, until they were saying hello to the bits of forehead they didn’t get to see nearly enough. “An’ have you ever birthed live young?”

They both thought about this for a moment. This far into the wine collection and an argument about baby bats, this argument seemed unimpeachable. Still, Aziraphale—who may have been drunker than he’d been in centuries but was still sure he was _right_ —said, “But you’re a snake.”

“ _Were,_ ” Crowley correct. “Or was? ’m not, is the thing.” He’d had four articulated limbs for six thousand years. He wanted credit for time served.

“Was,” Aziraphale said. “Ipso facto. You lay eggs.”

They also thought about this. For far longer than a moment.

“How do you figure that?” Crowley asked eventually.

“Therefore, bats lay eggs,” Aziraphale concluded triumphantly, having forgotten both his original argument and his knowledge of bats. Crowley didn’t notice. He was too busy wondering if he did lay eggs.

“I’ve never tried,” Crowley said. “Didn’t seem—I don’t know, not very demonic. Never thought about it really. And the upkeep.”

“Plus sharp teeth,” added Aziraphale, who was still thinking about bats.

“And the rabies,” concurred Crowley, who was still thinking about children. He swirled his wine, which transformed from a dry chardonnay to an 1879 merlot as he did so. “Hell wouldn’t approve, course. You could steal them or make deals for them, that’s no problem—you know how many people’ve offered me their first born?”

“Seven,” said Aziraphale, who’d heard every one of Crowley’s stories at least once.

“Bloody lot of times.”

“More than one a millennia.”

“Dunno even what I’d do with one.” Crowley slouched deeper in his chair—the chair, that is, that Aziraphale had begun to think of as Crowley’s chair. He’d sat in it every night for the last five days. He made every indication that he intended at future dates to continue sitting. How odd it was. They’d kept his visits to the store at a minimum before, for the sake of appearances. And now. Well. There were no appearances anymore. None that mattered. Who knew what one might do?

Aziraphale’s glass was suddenly full again as he raised it to drink with a desperate gusto.

“Big heads,” Crowley said staring up at the ceiling. “That’s cruel. Do you think if She hadn’t been so mad about the apple, Eve would’ve lain eggs? Seems easier than the other way. Compacter. Big heads, that’s shit. That’s just mean.”

It was an old argument. Their oldest, if you exclude, you know, _the_ Argument that had made Crowley a demon and kept Aziraphale an angel, but that hadn’t been personal. That hadn’t been _them_. For them, it all came back to that apple. And this was the part where Aziraphale was supposed to defend God and the divine plan. That was what they did. Crowley questioned. Aziraphale affirmed. Crowley pointed out the mystery of God’s cruelty and Aziraphale rebutted not with evidence of God’s kindness but with the assurance that whatever was happening was part of something Bigger. Unknowable. Eniffable.

Inaffable.

Imffefable.

_Something_ like that.

Aziraphale sobered up a little and said instead, “And messy too. A rather inauspicious entrance to the world.”

Crowley scrunched his nose. “That’s mortals all over. Lotsa mess. Just things going in and out until they die.”

“Then everything comes out.” Aziraphale finished his glass. It didn’t sit as well in his stomach as it had a moment ago. Angels, as a rule, don’t get indigestion.[8] As with many cases, Aziraphale was the exception to the rule. He could always be counted on over the years to ruin a nice meal with fretting. “I wonder if that’s what will happen to us.”

Crowley, who had gone so languid in his chair that he’d nearly become one with it, lolled his head to look at Aziraphale questioningly.

“If we got inconveniently discorporated,” Aziraphale clarified. “I doubt either side would be keen to give us a new body.”

Crowley looked up at the ceiling with the blank face that signified he too had sobered up just a touch. “No. Suppose they wouldn’t.”

They thought in silence. Not as long as they’d thought about the egg thing, but this was an even less pleasant topic to linger on. They’d never had to wonder what happened after they died. Like mess, it was a distinctly mortal phenomenon.

Crowley broke the silence first, straightening up in his chair with the air of a man who had weighed all available options and had decided to be cheerful. “Well, we’ve made it six thousand years so far without needing to get reissued. Or, er. I have. But you got your body back without needing Heaven anyway, so there you go.”

Aziraphale nodded slowly. “Yes. Precisely. We’ll just…keep on going on as we were.”

“Same as before.”

“No changes at all.”

“Right.”

They didn’t look at each other. Crowley studied the ceiling. Aziraphale studied the floor.

Aziraphale cleared his throat. “I mean, well, certainly some things could change,” he started. Crowley sat up in an instant to look at him, and Aziraphale lost his nerve, while not sure why he needed his nerve in the first place or what he’d been nervous for. “Maybe I should try to tend to the shop more faithfully.”

Generally speaking, Aziraphale disliked Crowley’s sunglasses. He never understood why Crowley felt the need to hide such beautiful eyes, and it made it awfully hard to read his expression sometimes. And usually it was at the precise moments that Aziraphale most wanted to read. “You? What, open at a consistent hour? Greet customers? Actually _sell_ a book?” Crowley said lightly. “Impossible.”

“Impossible things have been quite the norm lately.” Aziraphale smiled. “Surely customer service is the least of it.”

As if on cue, the bell over the door rang.

“We’re closed!” Aziraphale shouted reflexively. And then, in flustered response to Crowley’s wicked grin, he said, “Er, wait, no. Be with you in a moment.”

“Well done,” Crowley murmured as Aziraphale stood. “I can see the five star Yelp reviews rolling in.”

“No one’s screaming in my shop,” Aziraphale said before the smell of what had entered rolled over to them.

It smelled like Crowley, but worse.

Crowley was on his feet, his back straight, his hands clenched. Aziraphale wished he hadn’t returned the sword. He did however have an empty cup in his hand. A moment later, it was full of holy water.

They looked at each other and nodded.

_It had been nice while it lasted,_ Aziraphale thought bitterly as they strode to the stench. But it had been a fantasy, all these impossible things, all these impossible ideas. Crowley could say all he liked that they were on their own side now. Heaven and Hell would never leave them alone.

Aziraphale stepped in front of Crowley before Crowley could stop him, his holy water ready to throw. And the figure who had entered the store looked up from the book she’d been perusing, one of Adam’s contributions about boys on adventures who said stuff like “Gee whiz” and “Bully for us!”

She was short and gaunt with a black leather jacket and black jeans that looked painted on by a Surrealist artist. Her long black hair sat lopsided on her head like a tugged wig. If you looked closely, you could see spiders scuttling up and down the hairs. As Aziraphale watched, a scorpion skittered over her shoulders and disappeared somewhere in her left armpit. She looked like a monster. She smelled like damnation[9]. And she was smiling.

That’s what made Aziraphale falter. Demons smiled of course, but (excepting, as always, Crowley) not…like this.

“Hello! I’m from Hell! Lovely to be here!” the demon in the doorway announced. She beamed at Aziraphale. He didn’t think he’d ever been smiled at so brightly in his whole existence. She pointed at Crowley. “You are a traitor of the worst kind and I wish the worst tortures of this world upon you. Did you know you’ve got an angel sitting in your car?”

[1] So, just a few minutes younger than the entirety of existence. God got lonely quickly.

[2] Angels spend most of their time answering prayers, a fact that might surprise, to pick an entirely random example, a small child with a test they didn’t study for and a desperate promise to God that they’d find religion tomorrow if only there was a snow day. Angels do in fact grant requests such as this all the time. The problem was, at least from a human perspective, that angels split their attention amongst all the living creatures in the universe. Microorganisms with their completely unfair advantage in numbers made it easy to get behind on the needs of the macro. But it must be said, bacteria get all the snow days they ask for.

[3] Mostly prayers about mitosis. Asexual reproduction is just as nerve-wracking as the other kind, and that’s before you get pulled in half.

[4] In the same way that a doctor’s office might bill a positive pregnancy test as “primary amenorrhea” for the purposes of insurance, some sins were filed under descriptions that were only technically true. Angels didn’t sin, of course, but if they had, lying would have been filed under “unsanctioned creation,” which is viewed as seeking to usurp God. It makes the flaming sword thing all the more impressively stupid.

[5] Aziraphale had reported reams on the relative cleanliness of various cultures throughout history, but of course no one had ever actually read them. In Heaven’s defense, Aziraphale was as good at writing as he was at dancing, which is to say not as good as he thought, lacking any sense of rhythm, and prone to getting distracted halfway through by the catering.

[6] Tenacious book lovers being the only known natural predator of the book collector’s hoard

[7] It did not occur to Zazarael that the car would be locked and so it wasn’t. To be fair, it did not ever occur to the car’s owner to lock it. Locks were something that happened to mortals.

[8] This is because they don’t have GI tracts. Some orifices associated with it, yes, but that’s just for aesthetic flair. You wouldn’t _believe_ what you’d find if you cut one open.

[9] Sulfur and Axe body spray.


	2. Another Introduction and Then In Rapid Succession Several More

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Footnotes are stressful in multichapter fics, I'll be fiddling with them for a little bit. They work right now so long as you're in chapter by chapter view.

Deumos was short for a demon. She was short for just about anything. Her height, or lack, did wonders for her posture compared to the rest of her ilk. As they slouched, sulked, shambled, rambled, lurched, lurked, and (in the case of Crowley) lounged, you could have used Deumos as a ruler and drawn a perfect straight line. She kept herself as upright as possible as if she could stretch out her corporeal form through sheer force of will.[1]

Apart from this detail, Deumos looked like every other demon. She’d blend into a group shot if only you could see her. Her eyes shone like oil slinks, minus the polluted rainbows. There was an open sore on her left cheek that she’d gotten in the fourteenth century during a tussle with a Spanish Inquisitor who’d been _very_ surprised to find himself in Hell.[2] She wore black, of course, but not in a cool way. It was just that if you left any outfit in Hell for more than a night, it turned black. Leave it there longer and it might start manifesting leather and bondage straps. If she’d thrown her clothes in a vat of holy water, she might have been able to get them faded to a dingy grey[3], but you’d _know_. Something stained is always stained, after all. That was why she was a demon.

She’d only been to Earth once since her Fall. Hell had sent her to Italy during one of its more exciting years to tempt a pope with worldly desire. She’d arrived to discover that no more temptation was needed and spent an uncomfortable two weeks taking notes on the latest innovations on debauchery. When the pope was occupied (which was often and rarely with ecclesiastical matters) she searched for her own targets. She tried seducing a few nuns but discovered they were already sleeping together. She reached into the minds of local nobility with schemes of how to exploit those dependent upon them, only to find that the local nobility had already conceived of those schemes and rejected them in favor of far more ambitious ones. In a last ditch effort to be responsible for at least one sin, she convinced a blacksmith’s apprentice to indulge in sloth, but since he only agreed to take the afternoon off after she said she’d cover his shift, it hardly felt like an unqualified victory for the forces of darkness.

Deumos was forced to consider that she might be unforgivably naïve.

It wasn’t her fault. (No demon thinks anything is there fault except sometimes deep down in the most secret parts of themselves, and even that only happens once or twice a day. This is generally considered an improvement on the average angel who is _sure_ that nothing is their fault and has never once felt the need to reflect on that.) Of course she was a little sheltered. Deumos wasn’t of demonic stock. None of them were. That’s the point. They’d all been angels, and now they were looking at other ex-angels trying to figure out how ex-angels acted, which it turned out was a lot like angels but dirtier and in the opposite direction. Humans, meanwhile, walked out of the garden and started innovating immediately.[4]

So Deumos returned to Hell and lied, of course, about her wild successes, all of which had actually happened and none of which had required her in the process. Hell rewarded her graciously, which meant they didn’t punish her. And she went back to the same work as before. There wasn’t a lot of work in Hell. It turned out the main punishment of damnation was just being here in the first place. You could go give the humans a prod with your metaphorical pitchfork if you felt like it, and plenty of demons did, but Deumos got the impression that the humans liked it. They’d take the pain of something over the agony off nothing. Deumos understood that perfectly, and felt that she shouldn’t.

Mostly she just existed and lived with the knowledge that she’d have to keep on existing for as long as everything else did. She kept company with other miscreants of the abyss in a manner that wasn’t quite friendship. They shuffled around, kicked rocks, listened to the screams of the damned, and absolutely did not bum cigarettes from anyone because Hell was a non-smoking area. Some demons were cruel to other demons because they could be and because shit rolls downhill. Deumos and the demons like her lived at the bottom of the hill and mutually agreed there was already enough muck around. They didn’t talk about Heaven. Didn’t talk about Earth. Occasionally talked about meat hooks. You couldn’t trust them, but you knew where you stood with them.[5] And there was, occasionally, some solace in being miserable collectively.

Demons are what angels aren’t, you see, and angels are busy. Angels are obedient. Angels keep the universe running. Deumos remembered that. A lifetime ago, she’d helped build the element of aluminum. That’d been a long day of fiddling with electrons. She hoped whatever angel was in charge of it now hadn’t ruined it.

So she waited. They all waited. They waited for what demons waited for: the end of waiting.

And then the end arrived.

And then the end went.

And then the world spun on. That wasn’t the problem, since the planet’s spin was pretty much the only thing that had been expected to continue once the fighting was done. The problem was that humanity kept spinning with it.

That was almost an interesting turn of events. Deumos was almost not bored. 

Three days after the world didn't end, Beelzebub called Deumos into her office.[6] “You going back,” Beelzebub said.

“Whatever,” Deumos replied. She had no idea what was going on, but you didn’t get far in hell admitting that. “When’s this happening then?”

Beelzebub didn’t even have the courtesy to look cruel as she said, “Now.”

Getting from Hell to Earth isn’t an easy trip, but you can’t beat it for efficiency. Being fired out of your chair like a cannonball will get you basically anywhere you want to go, provided you’re made of the kind of mettle that can survive the trip. It helps if you’re used to having your skin ripped off. Deumos was mostly spiders so she was alright. She still passed out for the first time in her existence, and came to submerged in a rice paddy in the Mekong Delta. Specifically, she came to when a rice farmer stepped on her face.

The farmer had been quite concerned about Deumos’ health, at least after the farmer had stopped screaming.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Deumos said in the infernal tongue.[7] The words knocked the farmer out immediately. The infernal tongue to mortal ears is a bit much.

Deumos dragged the farmer out of the water and propped her up on a relatively dry bit of land so she wouldn’t drown. Demons weren’t supposed to kill if they could help it. You couldn’t tempt anyone once they were dead.[8] Then she collapsed on the ground behind her.

Deumos, demon from the bowels of Hell, looked around.

The land was green. The sky was blue. It took her a while to remember the words.

The farmer’s hair was black. That had been the hardest color to recall, because Deumos had thought that she’d known black. But she’d just known the color of things when things get dirty. Black was its own thing, every color in one, a more compete rainbow than any Roman painting with their overabundance of pride could have ever painted. The hair was a rippling, silken darkness. Not a corruption. Not a stain. Black, shameless and unapologetic.

Deumos tipped her head back and closed her eyes against the glow of the sun. She thought something too grand for mortals to comprehend. It would take six thousand years of almost uninterrupted monotony and inadequacy to get the inflection just right. But roughly translated, as all translations from the demonic mind must necessarily be, what Deumos thought was, _Oh. Gosh._

She left Vietnam with the farmer’s long black hair. She might have felt bad about that, if she hadn’t been a demon. Besides, Deumos hadn’t left the farmer completely bald-headed.

She’d left behind plenty of spiders.

Aziraphale had some experience defending his bookshop from those who meant it ill, but usually they were bankers or men who looked like bankers except with more guns or customers who hoped to buy something. He had technically fought off demonic invasions before, but mostly by yawning and saying things pointedly like “Would you look at the time?” and “I really must start closing up,” or “Go away, Crowley, I was nearly done with this chapter when you barged in and I must see how Liza is going to get herself out of this mess.”

“Get out, demon,” Aziraphale tried, sticking with what he knew. He gestured with the cup of holy water threateningly, which was a hard trick for the toughest of us and mostly looked like he was offering her a drink. Perhaps he should have skipped straight to throwing it in her face, but she was still perilously close to the books. Aziraphale had never learned how to get out demonic goo stains.

The demon had the nerve to look affronted. This too was oddly familiar. Crowley had the obvious animalistic characteristics, but none stronger than when you offended his pride and he took on the look of a cat sprayed with a water bottle when it jumped onto the counter. This new demon echoed it perfectly.

“I do have a name,” she said. “Very rude just shouting _demon_ at people, especially considering you’ve got that miserable excuse for one hanging out here with no fuss from you.”

Aziraphale risked taking his eyes off the new demon to glance at the old one. Crowley was ramrod straight, his jaw set. He looked cold. The way someone faced with a problematic spouse might look when they decided to lace the sugar with arsenic. “Hell’s following up on that trial then?” Crowley asked with tense nonchalance. 

She looked back at Crowley just as coldly. “Please. Hell doesn’t know I’m here.” She paused and then shrugged. “Or they do, but that’s not my problem. No one’s sent me to skulk around with a bucket of holy water if that’s what you’re saying. Nor hellfire,” she added to Aziraphale. 

“I should hope not!” exclaimed Aziraphale who, it must be said, was still thinking about his books.

“Not that it would matter much if I was,” the demon said. “I wouldn’t know how to kill you if I wanted to—which I don’t to be clear, stop shaking that glass at me. I don’t see what the two of you have got to fear from anybody at this point.”

“Nothing!” Aziraphale hoped he didn’t sound like what he was, which was someone who had just remembered he was supposed to be fireproof. “You’re quite right, we have nothing to fear. We’re quite, ah, er—”

“Unkillable,” Crowley interjected. “And very good at killing.”

“Yes, that. Powers beyond your ken and so on.”

“That is what I heard,” said the demon. Her eyes—as much as pure black eyes can be seen doing anything—flicked up and down Aziraphale like she was looking for scorch marks. “I saw _that one’s_ trial in Hell,” she said to Aziraphale. “I wonder what yours looked like in Heaven.”

“Much the same, I imagine,” Aziraphale said vaguely. And then, because he couldn’t resist, “How did Crowley’s trial look from your side? It must have been quite impressive. I heard he asked Michael for a bath towel. Surely, the _drama_ —”

Crowley jabbed his elbow against Aziraphale and said something under his breath like sounded like, “Read the room.”

“He did,” said the demon. “I wonder if those were Ligur’s last words too.”

“Nah,” said Crowley. “He mostly screamed.”

“That’s enough, both of you,” said Aziraphale. To his surprise, both demons turned to look at him. (Okay, Crowley wasn’t a surprise, he did what Aziraphale asked him to, but he usually insisted on being sarcastic about it first.) “Stop insulting my associate,” he said to the new demon. “And you, Crowley—”

Aziraphale had been about to say something like _what should we do now_ or _shall we let her go_ or _do you_ _know how to get demon goo out of books because I’ll follow your lead here but she is perilous close to a first edition of_ Gulliver’s Travels. But apparently it was Crowley’s turn to look like the affronted counter cat, and he snapped, “Your _associate_ doesn’t need a lecture, angel.”

Aziraphale was too taken aback to respond. Crowley didn’t give him a chance anyway. Suddenly, his head snapped up, his sunglasses whipped off, and his pupils shot open until his eyes were nearly as black as the other demon’s. If he’d been a growler, he’d be rumbling with it right now. But Crowley was what he was, so his next sentence slithered out with the sibilant stretched like a body on the rack. “What isssssssssssssssss that?” he, to be obvious, hissed.

Aziraphale and the demon shared a confused look, which marked the first occasion that Aziraphale had shared anything with a demon besides Crowley. “What is what?” Aziraphale asked, turning back to Crowley. More accurately, turning back to the place that Crowley had occupied until a moment ago. 

Demons can’t teleport when they’re attached to their corporeal forms. They can, however, when properly motivated, _move._

Aziraphale barely noticed the blur streak by before the front door slammed open with such force it tore the bell right out. It hit the wall and died with a choked off jangle.

“That’s better,” the remaining demon said cheerfully. She picked up the book she’d been holding before. “So do these all have the same words in them or are they new each time?”

The answer to the question Crowley had asked so insistently was one Crowley had known without needing to ask. A mother penguin returning to her colony after the long hard march from the sea picks her family out of the identical crowd by their distinctive cry. Crowley could have picked out the sound of the Bentley’s engine starting even if he was on the North Pole and it was on the south.

_Did you know you’ve got an angel sitting in your car?_

The angel in question was still where we left her, in the passenger seat of the Bentley now idling the curb. She was mildly surprised by the gentle rumbling, but not as much as she would have been if she hadn’t a moment ago wondered what it was that cars _did_. She understood the basics—humans sat in them and the cars did the going for them—but angels of her ranking didn’t settling for holistic understanding. If you told a child in her earshot that the sky was blue because God liked that color best, Zazarael would have swooped down and started lecturing about light spectrums.

At the moment, the micro level concept she was thinking about with cars involved internal combustion. It had been the work of a thought to conjure an experimental spark.

She was so absorbed in following that spark through the demonic machinations of Crowley’s Bentley that she hardly noticed that she suddenly felt the wind on her face. She only distantly wondered why she felt a grip on her arm. By the time she’d been fully grasped and dragged out of the car, she’d almost comprehended that something was happening on the macroscopic level.

Crowley for his part, powered by a rage both infernal and maternal, found himself shaken from his berserker fury as the angel started to emerge. It was the staggering expanse of what he was producing from behind his dashboard. He started pulling and she kept coming. It was a little like the trick with the clown car except there was only one of her. It was more like when a magician begs his only audience member to take the hanky he is generously offering, never mind that the hanky is obviously tied to a dozen others shoved up his dusty showman’s sleeve.[9]

She was tall and wide and, for good measure, deep. She was a looming pillar of sensible wool. Crowley was fleetingly curious to see her wings. They could have spanned the length of the street.

“Don’t touch my car,” he hissed instead, although his very impressive intimidation technique that he’d had planned had gotten derailed by the sheer amount of angel. The words came out almost flustered. The angel looked down at him. She had no choice about that.

“Why do you have a car?” she asked in a curiously distant voice. “Surely you can fly.”

“Of course I can fly,” snapped Crowley, who could technically fly, as long as he got a good running start and a very good updraft. It wasn’t worth the effort most of the time. You either stayed low enough that you spent the whole time dodging birds who had free reign of the sky but somehow always wanted to be wherever you were, or you went up higher and wished you put on several layers of long underwear first. And it wasn’t as easy as it had been in the early days, all that celestial light everywhere and angry Canadian geese still in the beta process. It was miserable work these days to keep a body aloft. Really, if God had meant for Her angels (and derivations thereof) to keep flying, She wouldn’t have gone ahead with gravity. She might have at least considered the aerodynamics of humanoid limbs. “What were you doing in there?”

“Waiting for you,” she said as though this was a perfectly natural statement.

It was at this point two thoughts occurred to Crowley:

  1. That he should not have left Aziraphale alone with an unknown demon of unknown power and unknown purpose one week after they’d royally thumbed their nose at both Heaven and Hell.
  2. Basically the same thought as before but with him and this angel.



Crowley was just starting to feel the heavy-limbed onset of panic when Aziraphale took this moment to come jogging up and grab Crowley. “She won’t leave!” he said urgently. “She’d going through the books!”

Crowley, feeling like all of this was starting to be A Bit Much for the moment, shook off Aziraphale and turned off the Bentley with a snap. “And she’s a demon,” Crowley reminded him, “who might be sent here to kill us.”

“Yes, that too,” Aziraphale said distractedly, looking back over his shoulder at the shop. Crowley nudged him again. Aziraphale looked back, his mind clearly tormented by the thought of unsupervised hands running over book spines. Then he noticed the angel who’d gone back to looking very intently at the Bentley in a way Crowley found deeply worrying. “Oh no, another one?”

The angel kept studying the car. She certainly did not look at Aziraphale. If anything, she tilted herself away. She didn’t react at all as Aziraphale sighed and asked, “Who are you then?” And that was as good as a reaction.

The angel said to Crowley, “I wouldn’t have hurt your car. I know how you feel about it.”

“Excuse me,” Aziraphale said, stepping into her line of sight. “What is your name?”

The angel said to Crowley and this time more pointedly only to Crowley as she raised her hand that she might not see the puffed up angelic bookseller attempting to intercept her gaze, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Crowley looked at the angel. Then he looked at his angel. His angel looked back and just as baffled as Crowley felt. Crowley couldn’t think of what to say.

“Fuck me,” supplied the other demon, who had emerged onto the street with a dozen books in her arms. She looked the other angel up and down approvingly. “If I sat on your shoulders, I could punch God in the face.”

The angel appeared to think about this for a moment. “Please don’t.”

“Fair enough.” The demon came over, hoisted her precarious pile of books onto one hip[10], and held out a hand. “Didn’t stop to say hi earlier when I rushed past, sorry about that. I’m Deumos.”

The angel cocked her head at the demon’s outstretched hand and then shook it. “Zazarael. You look familiar.”

“I worked on metals in the days of creation,” Deumos said. “Where were you stationed?”

“Ah yes, I see, we must have worked together. I assisted in the formation of iron.”

“Did you? Well done, humans still can’t get enough of the stuff.”

“Thank you for saying so.” Zazarael sounded pleased but flustered. It was the usual way some of the lower ranks of angels reacted to praise. They were never sure at what point you started sinning with pride, but just the same, you like someone to notice that a job’s been done well. “I’ve only been on Earth for two days, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how much use it still gets.” She gestured at the Bentley as an example, a gesture Crowley instantly resented.

Deumos wrinkled her nose at the car as if the smell of it disgusted her, then said suddenly, “You wouldn’t know who’s taken over aluminum management, have you?”

“I believe it’s self-managing. Most inorganics are.”

“Is it? You’re not just saying that?” Deumos beamed. “Oh, fantastic. I did that one. You hope you build it well enough the first time around that no one needs to keep fiddling with it, especially after all that work. Electrons, you know.” 

“Oh yes, I remember that quite well. It’s why I’ve been pleased to move onto unicellular creatures. You never need worry that if you look away, they’ll be both dead, alive, present, and absent.”

“Exactly! And then you do look at them and oh no, now someone’s yelling because you’ve altered their fundamental nature and location by observing them.” Deumos shook her head. “A nightmare, really.”

“Certainly difficult,” Zazarael said diplomatically.

“WHY ARE YOU HERE?” Crowley asked in as reasonable a manner as the situation warranted.

The angel and demon—the other two, the new ones—started as if they’d quite forgotten there was another couple nearby, including one who kept making swipes as the books in Deumos’ arms whenever she shifted. “We’re you,” Deumos said. “Obviously.”

“New representatives,” Zazarael said. “The only ones for the time being, although Michael expressed that there might be more.”

“Probably because the last time they left one angel and one demon alone on Earth, you ruined everything for everyone,” Deumos added. Zazarael nodded.

“Ask humanity if they think that,” Crowley said. “Ask the whales.”

“They sent you here to do my old job?” Aziraphale asked Zazarael, who looked so uncomfortable as she studied her feet that you’d think her skin didn’t fit.

“She can’t talk to you, dingus,” Deumos said. “You’re a corrupted being and she’s an angel.”

“I’m—I’m a—I’m a what?” Aziraphale spluttered.

“He’s not corrupted!” Crowley said and gestured at all of Aziraphale as if this should make his point. “He’s—he’s wearing tartan!”

“He’s immune to hellfire, I don’t know what you call that,” Deumos said. She raised her eyebrow at Aziraphale. “Plus, aiding and abetting a demon since the beginning of humanity. That’s, I mean. Even putting aside stopping the apocalypse—”

“A good thing to do, I might add!” Aziraphale did add.

“But not your job, was it? Not your purpose?” Deumos sounded admiring which made everything worse. “And what’s an angel that doesn’t do their job?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Crowley, who had already thought of all of this and hoped he might discuss the matter with Aziraphale gently and drunkenly at a more convenient time. He touched Aziraphale’s arm. “Remember, angel? Our side.”

Aziraphale gaped at him. “Yes, yes, but…am I a demon?”

“I don’t know what you are,” Deumos said. “Hell doesn’t want you either. Which is impressive, right? That’s like out-demoning the demons. Very cool.” She looked at Zazarael for confirmation. Zazarael gave her a return look that said that she couldn’t in her official capacity condone that as cool.

Aziraphale looked like he might faint. Crowley wasn’t sure how that worked, but he kept a tight grip on Aziraphale’s arm just in case. “I mean,” Aziraphale said, sounding like he’d been hit on the head by a frying pan, “it’s good for some, I suppose.”

Crowley gave Aziraphale a supportive pat and snapped at Zazarael, "But you’ll talk to me though, you’ll talk to that one.” He jerked his head at Deumos. “You seem to pick and choose your shunning.” 

“Deumos is a demon,” Zazarael said. “I understand our relationship with demons.”

“Straightforward,” Deumos agreed cheerfully. “Often fatal.”

“But you…you and…whoever else might be like you, you’re not either anymore. We don’t know what you are.” If Zazarael looked uncomfortable before, she looked like she was regretting even climbing into a corporeal form now. Angels lived in ranks and spent their days classifying and enacting order upon those classifications. The idea of some nameless, rankless thing like them but not them, originating from the divine order but seemingly outside it—Crowley quickly grasped how anathema this was to her.[11]

“Then why can you talk to me?” Crowley asked sharply.

Zazarael looked at him with the kind of big eyes incapable of guile. “Because you’re not corrupted. You’re redeemed.”

“What,” said Crowley.

“What?” asked Aziraphale.

“I bloody well am not,” said Crowley again.

“What if you are?” asked Aziraphale.

“Maybe that’s why you smell so bad,” said Deumos.

“You really can’t talk,” said Zazarael.

Crowley, for lack of other ideas as to what to do at this moment, sniffed himself. He smelled a bit like an angel, sure, but he was holding one up in his arms. He smelled Aziraphale for good measure, who did smell a bit like a demon, but again, holding was, much like the place the four of them were currently standing, a two-way street.

“Why are you here?” Aziraphale reiterated, in more quiet but just as confused tone as Crowley’d asked it a few minutes ago. “Why are _both_ of you here?”

The angel and demon looked at each other and then at the angel and the demon.

“I want to know about Earth,” Deumos said to Aziraphale.

“I want to know about you,” Zazarael said to Crowley.

“I want a drink,” Aziraphale said to Crowley.

“I want several,” Crowley said to Aziraphale.

“I want you lot out of the bloody road!” the truck driver laying on the horn shouted at all of them.

In the immediate short-term, only one of the five got what they wanted. It was Aziraphale, who miracled the cup of holy water he was still clutching into a drink with no redeemable features save for its alcohol content while Crowley teleported the truck and driver to Massachusetts. 

* * *

[1] And she should have been able to. She could do just about everything else to her body, including turn it inside out (a great trick for the kids), but Hell was all about suffering and so therefore she was eternally four foot eleven and a half.

[2] Specifically, he’d tried to punch her, and as his fist touched her cheek, her flesh erupted into a mass of spiders, that swarmed over his writhing flesh until he’d calmed down. She’d gotten most of the spiders back, but a few had been crushed underfoot as he flailed. Hence the sore.

[3] It also would have melted her into cosmic nothingness if she put it on, but there’s always a price for Fashion.

[4] The flaming sword had given them a good start. While demons were still working out their organizational charts, humans had already mastered both impalement and immolation.

[5] Hell.

[6] It looked like every single middle management office in the world. Hell had stolen from the best. The only difference was that the “hang in there” poster with the kitten also featured a noose.

[7] Which is the same as the celestial tongue but with _flair._

[8] Took Hell a few centuries to figure that one out.

[9] This was, of course, a favorite trick of Aziraphale’s, although largely because it allowed him to reuse all those silk handkerchiefs he’d collected over the years.

[10] Aziraphale whimpered.

[11] In her cottage in Tadfield, Anathema straightened up at her kitchen table. “What is it?” Newt asked as he plated dinner. “You look like someone walked over your grave.”

“Things are happening,” Anathema muttered darkly. “Goddamn it.” That was the worst thing about the world. There were _always_ things again. 


	3. The Potential Energy of the Second Arrangement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same thing with the footnotes as last time, which is the links work in chapter view but not in "view entire work." I know the html now to make it work, I just...hate formatting........... there's a lot of things to type and they're all very specific and very ugly. I'll do it soon, I swear.

When it was clear that two of the people present would not talk to one of the other two people in this four person conversation, Deumos decided the matter. “Right. Flip you for it, angel.”

Zazarael and Aziraphale both said, “Pardon?”

Deumos pointed at Zazarael. “Heads or tails. Winner decides who leaves.”

Zazarael thought. “We all have heads.”

“Okay so I win.” She shoved the dozen books into her back pocket[1] and said to Aziraphale, “I’ll cede the ground today. You’re free tomorrow around, I dunno, when’s the sun come up?”

“You’re leaving?” Aziraphale asked and then quickly added to that there wasn’t any misunderstanding, “I mean good, of course, please, I insist.” He had not eliminated assassination as a motive yet, since that was the only thing that made sense.

“Crowded right now, yeah?” Deumos gave Crowley the stink-eye.[2] Crowley responded with an offensive gesture that would have started a street fight in ancient Babylon; it involved both hands and implied much about your relationship with your relatives and your goats. “So you all can figure this out. I’ll take a walk in the—you know. It’s long? Like a road but it’s all wobbly and things go in it? And it’s got cars but they sorta…” She held her hand out and bounced it gently.

Aziraphale had always been great at parlor games. He excelled in particular at Charades—anyone lucky enough to play with Mr. Fell agreed that he had an alarmingly expressive form—but he was a fair hand at all variants on Secret Word as well. Centuries of experience went into Aziraphale’s guess of, “The river? The Thames? You’re going to walk in the Thames?”

Deumos snapped. “That’s the word! I knew it, I mean, I know about _rivers,_ we got one with the souls of the damned in the subbasement, and I walked across loads of them to get here, but you forget that they mean the word, you know? Like, you forget there’s rivers out there with, like, water.” She frowned suddenly. “It isn’t holy water, is it?”

Aziraphale, who’d lived near the Thames for centuries now and had seen everything that had sluiced into it, said, “Decidedly profane.”

“Wonderful. Let’s meet in there then.” She started walking backwards as she talked, striding, just short of bounding. “You can bring that _that one_ with you if you’re scared. Just stick him upwind.”

“Go to Hell,” Crowley suggested.

“I did my time, serpent. Learn to share.” She winked twice, neither time at him. “Angels.”

As she turned and disappeared around a corner, Crowley shoved both his hands in his pockets and said wistfully, “Maybe she’ll drown.”

“We can only hope,” Aziraphale fretted.

At this, Zazarael winced. Then she pretended she hadn’t.[3] Aziraphale noticed this and said louder, “I do hope both of our inconvenient and unwanted guests leave before our horrid corruption afflicts them. It would be very dangerous for them to linger. You are, after all, a demon, and I myself have been called a disgrace of an angel within just this last fortnight.”

Crowley said, equally as loudly, “Yeah, they said you were very bad.” And then quieter, “Only are you feeling alright about saying this, because a moment ago you seemed to be taking it badly, and it’s not that I don’t want you to embrace the darkness, but—”

“Not the time, my dear.”

“Right, right.” And shouting again, “You taught me all the evil I know! My wicked mentor! Your corruption is unmatched by even the foulest fiends of Hell!”

“I know where you live,” Zazarael said to Crowley as Aziraphale murmured, “Too much, dear, too much.”

Crowley, who had been gearing up for a good declamation of Aziraphale’s various sins[4], narrowed his eyes at Zazarael. “That a threat?”

“No. I am telling you facts. I know where you are. I can feel you wherever I go.” Zazarael looked at him with a face that teachers, nannies, and authority figures didn’t know that they’d been emulating since the start of time. It brought up Crowley short. Made him feel like he ought to tuck in his shirt.[5] “And I need to speak with you in order to best perform my job. Performing my job poorly is not an option. Therefore, we will speak. I am patient. I will make myself available until you are also available.”

Luckily, Crowley was very good at ignoring authority figures. It was arguably what had made him Crowley. “You’ll follow me around me until I crack.”

Zazarael raised one shoulder and dropped it. It was rather like the shifting of a mountain range.

“I dare say I don’t approve of fighting an angel,” Aziraphale said under his breath to Crowley. “But if we must, there’s two of us now.”

Crowley looked at Aziraphale. Then he looked at Zazarael. His eyes were yellow with a black line in them. And then, they were black.

And then the pupils went back to being a line.

And then they blew out again.

It was like watching a camera fiddle with its autofocus. Aziraphale, having never seen a Youtube makeup tutorial, didn’t understand his urge to hold his own hand in front of Crowley’s eyes for a moment until everything calmed down.

Crowley’s pupils fluttered once more, unimpeded, before he snapped his sunglasses back on. “Yeah, alright then,” he said, and then added, “Not to your thing, Aziraphale.”

Aziraphale, who’d already nodded grimly and started to pull something from his jacket, paused in confusion.

Crowley nodded at the other angel. “You wanna talk? Let’s talk.”

Zazarael accepted this with the slightest tilt of her chin. “Now?”

“Sure,” said Crowley. “You’ve already ruined our evening.”

“Crowley!” Aziraphale hissed.[6] “You cannot mean to go off with this, this…” Aziraphale’s vocabulary was immense, but his general avoidance of profanity left him floundering in moments like this. He went with the worst thing he could think of. “This _substitute_!”

“You said you’re patient,” Crowley said to Zazarael as he hooked his arm through Aziraphale. “Wait.”

He dragged Aziraphale back across the street, with Aziraphale still looking over his shoulder at the angel settling at parade rest by the Bentley like she had every intention to wait and none to leave. Crowley tapped Aziraphale’s shoulder and jerked his hand back when Aziraphale jumped. “Listen, we knew this might happen.”

“Did we?” asked Aziraphale. “Because I’ll confess, this has been a turn for me.”

“We knew that there would be consequences. Eventually.” Crowley frowned. “Didn’t think they’d happen so quickly. Heaven and Hell must have turbo-charged their bureaucracy.”

“Heaven never has left a job open long.” Angelic duties did not have vacancies. “And, I suppose, I _was_ —”

“Don’t say it.”

“Fired.”

Crowley stared through Aziraphale with the resigned acceptance necessary for the world’s oldest friendship.[7] “Right, so they want people on Earth, and that’s not us anymore. But there’s no reason we shouldn’t have a good relationship with them.”

“They already hate us!” Aziraphale protested. He pointed at Zazarael. “Look, she’s got her hand back up so she doesn’t have to see me.”

“Sure,” said Crowley, who was very used to being hated and pointedly ignored. “But _both_ of them don’t dislike _both_ of us. You’ve got a demon keen to learn from you. I’ve got an angel who… Well, I’m not sure what she’s interested in.”

(Crowley wouldn’t have like the current answer. Right now, the angel in the course of avoiding the sight of Certain Figures, had gone back to looking at the Bentley. Even inert, it thrummed with potential energy, which angels can see just as well as they see kinetic energy if they squint.[8] In terms of potential, the Bentley was perched on the edge of a cliff, strapped to a rocket that NASA had rejected as Too Powerful, and carting an aged barrel of original formula Four Loco in the back.

Zazarael nudged its front wheel with the tip of her umbrella. It was a testament to how deeply Crowley was currently staring into Aziraphale’s eyes that he did not notice.)

“Point is,” Crowley continued, oblivious, “it’s Warlock all over again.”

The look Aziraphale gave Crowley at this summed up Aziraphale’s opinion of how those eleven years had gone.

Crowley pressed bravely on. “We can _guide_ them.”

(Zazarael poked the car again. The Bentley’s spirit—because Zazarael wasn’t quite ready to call it a _soul_ —shivered.)

“Towards?”

“Leaving us alone.”

(“You seem troubled,” Zazarael said to the car. Its loyalty to Crowley waged with its astonishment at a new conversant, and because it was indeed its master’s car, curiosity won. Its hood beckoned her to rest her hand upon it.)

Aziraphale opened his mouth to respond. Then he thought about it.

(And while he did, Zazarael rested her hand on the hood of the Bentley.)

Warlock had been the wrong child, yes. And doubtless Adam would have turned out differently if Crowley and Aziraphale had been at all competent. But it hadn’t been a bad idea. Warlock was the most neutral, albeit chaotic, child Aziraphale had ever met.[9] On the other hand, supernatural entities from Heaven and Hell would already have their innate urges and upbringing to influence them. Talking to someone from the other side would be essential to nudge them towards the middle. It’s one thing to be steeped in theory and another to apply it to practice. There’s nothing worse in a workplace than someone new who comes in knowing what it is they ought to be doing with no idea of how things actually are. They do stuff like ask, “Why are we doing this?” and “Is this the fastest way?” and “Aren’t you supposed to have a helmet on?”

You might not have a good answer to give them. You might not have an answer at all. “Because that’s how we do things” doesn’t get the respect it ought to.

Worst of all, these new people might listen to your answers—the good, the bad, the incomplete, the tips and tricks you’ve learned and the workarounds you’d never tell your bosses about, the warnings about what’s broken and maybe-reasonable-maybe-defensive explanations of why those things can’t be fixed—and then they might go off and _change things anyway._

Which was good, obviously. Change is. Good. In moderation. But. One must be careful with that. There was a reason that new people worked with old people. It was so the old ones could tell them to stop doing what they were doing before they messed up everything.

Aziraphale hadn’t worked so hard to stop the end of the world so some Johnny-come-lately fresh to the field could set about _changing_ it.

(The Bentley, by the way, had shown Zazarael fire _._ In fact, quite an excessive amount of it.

“Oh dear,” she murmured, drawing back her hand. She didn’t think about why she said _dear_. It was the only pet name she knew. If it had occurred to her that she was mimicking Aziraphale, it wouldn’t have rolled off her tongue so easily.)

“We do have valuable experience,” Aziraphale said slowly.

Crowley, following the scent of a successful temptation, nodded fervently. “Shouldn’t they benefit from that? Who better to guide them through Earth than _us_? We’re experts.”

Aziraphale beamed at that. “I suppose we rather are. You don’t see it until someone new comes in, but we’ve got quite the handle of humanity,” said the angel who never paid taxes on his lucrative London business location or went to the bathroom for any anatomic necessity or put on a pair of shoes without magically summoning them onto his feet.

“Of course we have,” said the demon who never bought gas except that one time for fun and enjoyed airing out his wings on hot days and did put on shoes the normal way but the socks were _always_ snakeskin.

“And then, if the conclusion they should take from our tutelage is that they should like to work elsewhere…”

“So much the better,” Crowley agreed. “I mean, London. London’s taken care of. We did London great.” 

“Yes, exactly. If anything we overdid London,” Aziraphale said eagerly. Then he frowned. “You don’t think we’ve neglected the rest of the world?”

“Nah,” said Crowley, who had helped create nonchronological newsfeeds, autoplay videos, and three separate Instagram trends. “Besides, we know it runs itself when you get down to it.”

(There was a sound on the street. Neither Crowley and Aziraphale noticed it, being wrapped up in their own cleverness and each other and each other’s cleverness. The sad truth is that for most of human history, if you wanted to avoid the eye of Heaven or Hell, you just had to mention to one of them that the other one was also in the area and had mentioned how much he’d like to get dinner with an old friend. They might have noticed the sound if they had a frame of reference for it, but they’d been notably absent when the Hellhound became Dog. The sound on the street was one of the rush of air into a vacuum left behind a creature very large becoming very small. Although compared to the ear popping that swept up the London street, Dog’s had been a relatively sedate whoosh. Even if the transformation from “small brown bear on fire” to “terrier mutt” was a dramatic one, the size difference was only part of it. Zazarael remained in the exact same form. It was just that her current BMI could only be charted on the periodic table.)

“You take the demon. I’ll take the angel. We’ll do what we do best.” He pointed at himself. “Wiles.” He pointed at Aziraphale. “Thwarting. We tell them all about, I dunno, how wonderful America is and wouldn’t they like to make their mark over there? Or Hungary or Zimbabwe or—” Crowley waved his hand vaguely upward. “Who’s looking after Heaven’s interests on the moon? Very neglected area, the moon.”

“We do have a man stationed there, but I see your point.”[10] Aziraphale smiled like he was trying to be cautiously optimistic and then grinned when caution failed. “It is a very large world.”

“Why shouldn’t we be able to share it?” Crowley asked magnanimously. “Besides, we can always kill them later.”

“Really, my dear,” Aziraphale chided, grateful that Crowley had been the one to say it, as they both turned back to the angel.

The angel who was not there.

Or rather, she was. But on a scale that made previous measures of location useless.

Aziraphale blinked. He almost said something like “We ran her off rather fast,” except he got the feeling from the way Crowley was bristling next to him that they hadn’t done that at all.

The Bentley made a noise. The ignorant ear might think it was metal cooling. A proper car expert would recognize it as a hiccup.

“I got this,” Crowley said. “You get the demon. Send them both to Mars. Meet up for dinner tomorrow.”

“Do you need help?” Aziraphale asked quickly.

Crowley was already stalking and shrinking, which meant that the next sentence started in one pitch and finished in a far higher one. “No one else is touching my car!”

This battle cry ending on an indignant squeak undercut the threat somewhat. Aziraphale still managed to summon some reluctant pity for Zazarael as Crowley, a subatomic bat out of Hell, zipped into the Bentley after her.

* * *

[1] Strictly speaking Hell doesn’t have men or women and they certainly don’t have gendered clothing, but if they _did_ , because it’s a concept certainly miserable enough to be there, the female…ish demons still wouldn’t have dressed accordingly. They were used to a certain quality of pockets. Anything that holds less than a Buick is an insult.

[2] Featuring real stink.

[3] Zazarael was having a hard time during this entire exchange. Engaging with demons was one thing—that was expected even if the one she was supposed to be thwarting was more pleasant than expected. And _redeemed_ demons, no one had figured that one out. But ex-angels, bad angels… The memo that had gone out after Aziraphale’s trial had been very tense, very vague, and very alarming, in large part because it laid out a new ruling—mandated shunning—without any _rules._ She wasn’t supposed to have heard Aziraphale or acknowledge his presence, which probably meant that she wasn’t supposed to react to him. But was she supposed to oppose him? Or even fight him? Zazarael assumed she was a good fighter, but she’d never had to test it. And Aziraphale had to be the most fearsome combatant in Heaven to walk out as he did. So. Zazarael wasn’t sure what she was expected to do and definitely didn’t know what she wanted to do, so she mostly glared off at the horizon and hoped no one asked anything of her on the subject until someone informed her of the proper course of action.

[4] Gluttony mostly, but with good amounts of pride. Some sloth as well, though not as much as Crowley. And yes, technically greed since Crowley wasn’t sure what else you could call an endlessly increasing horde of books you refuse to divest. And he was occasionally prone to envy, but mostly about books. And wrath, but once more, when people damaged his books. Come to think of it, the only one Crowley wasn’t sure about was lust and that was simply because he’d never seen what Aziraphale did alone with, again, his books.

[5] There wasn’t enough room in his pants to fit any shirt. In fact, there wasn’t any separation between the pants and the legs. When he wanted to stop wearing them, he shed.

[6] But not as well as Crowley did it.

[7] The eighth deadly sin is “Puns” and Aziraphale was unrepentant. 

[8] They can even see types of potential energy the rest of us haven’t even begun to calculate yet. Scientists have figured out categories like elastic potential energy—the potential energy of an extended spring, for example, or a pulled back rubber band aimed at an unsuspecting arm—and gravitational potential energy—the potential energy of every delicate glass object on a shelf in a household with cats. But angels can see the full spectrum, including but in no way limited to: romantic potential energy (measured in reference to the Social Heuristic of Interpersonal Potential between any two or more beings), comedy improv show potential energy (of which there is no middling conversion to actual energy, it is either Good or BAD), and family dinner potential energy (the most complex calculation involving such variables as cousins, babies, new partners, ex-partners, family tradition about who gets to make that side dish no one likes but everyone insists be present, alcohol, more alcohol, gender divisions of labor that shouldn’t be present but Gawd Maureen I mean if Bob and the others want to grunt at each other on the couch while we chat in the kitchen I’m not going to ruin our night by dragging them back, yet more alcohol, and the results of the last election.)

[9] Not that Aziraphale met many children. He loved them, of course, but only because he had to. He didn’t trust anything that naturally sticky. You should have seen how quickly he handed the toddler Jesus back to Mary.

[10] It’s been a quiet existence except for that time he’d been out on his morning constitutional and nearly flung himself off into space when Neil Armstrong snuck up on him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't generally reply to comments because doing so makes me so anxious that receiving comments stops being fun (and I very much love them very much when they are fun), but PLEASE BELIEVE I am so grateful for all the nice things you have said about this fic so far!


	4. There's an Obvious Queen Reference I Could Use as a Title

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If this chapter had a subtitle, it would be: "But the Show Got There First" 
> 
> This chapter is up later than I planned, but it's also longer than I planned so I hope that balances out. It features a semi-fictionalized history of Bentleys and the Le Mans race, with I imagine just enough facts to be frustrating to people who know what really happened.

Let’s call this a flashback. Or better yet, call it a cold open.

Crowley liked going fast. There was a lot of world and he wouldn’t see any of it by ambling. More than that, he liked the feeling of speed, even (especially) when he had nowhere to go. “Sauntering vaguely downwards” had described the attitude, not the velocity—the best part (the only good part) of the Fall was, well, the falling.

Rough landing but a hell of a ride. 

Therefore Crowley had been an early adopter of every innovation in transport, all the way back to Eve figuring out how to do a light jog[1]. He’d been there for the invention of the wheel and the wheelie and the Heely. He’d started his time on this horrid wondrous world slithering through the dust and had spent every moment since then making sure he never had to do that again.

So needless to say, cars.

Crowley slept through most of the 19th century with two exceptions: first, when he tried to wheedle holy water out of Aziraphale, and two, when the roaring racket outside of his increasingly less secure resting place informed him of the invention of the machine gun. With these two touchpoints for the previous century, Crowley awoke in 1902 with a cracking headache, an urge to dive into a swimming pool of coffee, and a general dread as to what humanity had gotten up to in his absence. Since humanity had never met an expectation it couldn’t live up to or down to, it confirmed most of his grim predictions. But oh. _Oh._ Now there were _cars._

Some people feel most themselves in a dress or a pair of slacks or with half their face rotting off or as three glowing faces, one of a lion, one of a lamb, and one of an eagle, all attached to a celestial body of no discernible mass. Crawley had been born in the Fall. But Anthony J. Crowley? That had just been a name before he sat behind his first steering wheel.[2]

In those early years, he went through cars like humans went through tissues.[3] This one was faster, this one was shinier, this one made the most delightful racket as it roared down roads still meant for horses. Crowley tried every vehicle on the market and most that weren’t. If a farmer in Devonshire got the idea to stick a motor to his wheelbarrow, Crowley sat in it.

But the best, the _best_ , was racing.

Crowley didn’t compete under his own name of course. Paperwork was becoming more of a thing at the turn of the century, and that coupled with an unnerving run of exorcists who actually managed to exorcise, he operated under the principle of flash bastard, yes, but with less of a paper trail. Humans were oblivious to nearly everything, but if there’s one group that can and will sniff out anomalies, it’s sports statistics enthusiasts. So when Crowley won the Le Mans three years running, it was as three different but all devilishly slick racers in three different but all devilishly slick cars.[4]

In a show of uncharacteristic sportsmanship and characteristic hubris, Crowley didn’t use his natural advantages. He raced cars that any human could have procured (provided the human had unlimited wealth, black market connections, and a dozen scared-for-their-immortal-soul mechanics on standby) and with no infernal trickery (except for six thousand years’ experience when it came to moving around the world). If you were going to compete with humans, Crowley thought magnanimously, you must lower yourself to their capacities. He couldn’t help it if he did that and still handily won.

When 1927 rolled around, Crowley was looking for his fourth win. He was driving a custom car that had started its life as a Ford the same way that Frankenstein’s monster had started his life as some dead person’s left foot. The chassis was so thoroughly modified that its mother couldn’t have recognized it. It had more in common with trains than other sport cars, in that anyone lying down in its path would be so much red dust in the air. It had an engine that could outrace the blare of its own horn. People took a good long look at it as he pulled up to the starting line because once it started moving, all they’d see was a streak.

Crowley came in second.

Crowley came in second to a man who said, “Jolly good race, eh?” with the kind of aggressively posh accent that made you wonder why the English had never trundled out the guillotine. Crowley stared down at the driver’s outstretched hand until it developed a nasty rash.

Aziraphale broke the uneasy silence between them to send him congratulations on his near victory. Crowley decided to go at least another decade without speaking to him.

He’d gone too easy on them, that was all. He’d win next year.

In 1928, he came in second. 

In 1929, he came in second again. 

The jolly good chaps winning races were called the Bentley Boys, and they were exactly the type of gentlemen that you’d expect to eagerly adopt that moniker. They were mostly independently wealthy, they were mostly veterans, they were mostly boys, and they mostly drove Bentleys as they won most races. The Bentley Company couldn’t make a profit, but it could make a damn fine car. A racer’s race car. Sporting. Sleek. Seriously fast.

Crowley wasn’t sure which he hated more: the boys or the Bentleys.

The thing that rankled was that he could have won. Obviously, he could have. Hard to race a car with no wheels and Crowley could have done that with a snap of his fingers, let alone any other number of nasty thing that he’d considered doing to the drivers themselves. But the problem was that he shouldn’t have to do that. He’d been driving longer than any other living being. He should just _win._[5]

His 1930 car was a beauty, the way shark’s teeth and razor wires are beautiful. It was a knife on four wheels. It never stalled and it never swerved and as long as Crowley kept his foot on the pedal, it would never stop. It barely needed fuel. It ran on spite. It was perpetual motion in a car. It was a line. It was a blur. It was the platonic ideal of speed. It made his previous cars look like wheelbarrows (which, Crowley could tell you, could still move a hell of a lot faster than you’d expect).

It came in third. To a Bentley. And another Bentley.

Aziraphale sent Crowley a card that said, “Better luck next time.” Crowley contemplated burning his bookshop down.

Crowley did not enter the 1931 Le Mans. He was rather too busy that year with his work. Maybe arranging matters so that Rolls-Royce purchased Bentley wasn’t _directly_ winning souls for Hell, but the transaction involved a lot of men in suits exchanging a lot of money, and enough of either of those in a room and you can’t breathe for all the moral turpitude. Crowley and Hell worked on the assumption that anything too expensive was inherently sinful, and they were usually right.

And Rolls-Royce, as it happens, wasn’t interested in racing cars. What Rolls-Royce thought what was lovely, what was really lovely, was _luxury._

So in 1933, rolling out from the factories of Derby, came the Bentley 3½ Litre. It was remarkably light and remarkably comfortable and remarkably quiet. The silent sports car, people called it, but it wasn’t really. A sports car, that is. It certainly was silent. It made nary a peep in the racing world. Oh sure, some grumbled about the new design, some clung to the old, some raced the car anyway and did quite well though, of course, not as good as before, and some switched cars altogether. The general public largely preferred Bentley the luxury brand. W.O. Bentley himself said that there was no Bentley he’d rather drive. When Crowley read that, he made a noise of delight that Heaven would have shuddered to hear.[6]

“Bentley sells the engine, chassis, and wheels, and we finish them off,” George M. F. Rush, coachmaker and aspiring used car salesman who was unfortunately still stuck with the new stuff, explained to the strangely smug man sauntering through the showroom. “We’ve taken the curtesy of customizing these vehicles already to save the discerning customer time.”

“How discerning can they be if they let you finish off the car?” the customer said. It was seven in the evening on a winter night and he wore dark glasses that wholly obscured his eyes. _Prick,_ George thought reflexively and correctly. “I was told you picked up a model on the cheap earlier this week. What’s wrong with it?”

“Oh nothing, nothing, sir, she runs like a beauty,” George lied easily. “It’s just a bit of superstition is all. The company assigns numbers to each car in the series and it turns out people don’t like having car number thirteen.”

George wouldn’t have told Crowley the full truth even if he’d liked him. Truth be told, he didn’t like talking about it at all. Didn’t like looking at the car even, which was why it was still unfurnished. There was just something…wrong with it. The Derby factory finished assembling car number thirteen and rolled it out the door before the wheels were bolted on. It didn’t feel right, the men muttered darkly about it when they thought it couldn’t hear. Turned on when no one touched it. Made noises it shouldn’t. Always seemed closer than you’d left it. And no matter what they did, they couldn’t get it to run quietly, like every other Bentley did. Its littermates purred; number thirteen roared.

No one was sure how a new car built from scratch could be haunted, but cars were still a recent technology. Maybe ghosts were what made the wheels turn. In any case, the mechanics nailed a horseshoe to the underside of the carriage and sold it for pennies on the pound.

Crowley knew all of this, of course. He’d commissioned lucky number thirteen for himself and he was very pleased to hear that it had already inherited several traits from its daddy. 

An interesting note for you racing historians out there: A Bentley would not win the Le Mans again until 2003. It was driven by a single newcomer to the scene who promptly disappeared afterwards, which should have been treater as a bigger mystery than it was except that no one who tried to think about this fact could manage to hold it in their minds. Video footage shows the driver in a white tracksuit sans advertisements but featuring a trim waistcoat. He fidgets uncomfortably in front of the camera which somehow can’t focus when pointed at him. “I couldn’t let it go another year,” he says tersely in his victory interview. “He gets so smug, it’s unbearable. Really, I understand holding a grudge—not, of course, that I would do such a thing—but really, my dear boy, seventy years is quite enough.”

It should be noted that while this driver won the race in the traditional way—i.e. he did manage drive faster than everyone else—it wasn’t a very triumphant victory. Whenever any of the cars racing stopped to refuel, none of them ever started again.

You can play the intro now, if you like.

Back in present day, Zazarael and Crowley were both currently smaller than the average proton and soaring through the molecular space of the Bentley in a way that isn’t at all like swimming but is similar enough to let you get the rough idea. Don’t let scientists and angels trick you; the world has the same rules at all scales. It’s just that when you’re small enough, it’s hard for the authorities to see when you’re breaking them. And in terms of describing what everything looks like for those supernatural beings, we natural beings are hopelessly large and encumbered with silly ideas like colors and shapes and directions, things that simply don’t exist where Zazarael and Crowley are now. For our purposes, just imagine they’re swimming, except they can talk with the water and there’s no water and nothing exists in the same place for more than a moment and sometimes they exist in multiple places simultaneously and if you come up too fast, instead of getting the bends, you pop out in 3467 A.D. as a baby.

But otherwise, it’s exactly swimming.

Crowley was swimming furiously after the angel who’d dived into his car. He didn’t know why she had. He didn’t much care. It was his car. It was wrong enough she’d been sitting inside of it. He hadn’t imagined how much more inside she could get.

Zazarael for her part wasn’t thinking at all about Crowley. She had a monofocus, a result of working one cell at a time, and at the moment, she was following what we might visualize as blood in the water (although of course that wasn’t what it looked like at all).

Cars don’t have a brain in them[7], but some do have a consciousness. The Bentley’s essence was decentralized throughout its frame, its mundane and magical matter. A CAT scan of our brains might show how we light up differently after trauma. The Bentley couldn’t concentrate that damage and so it was suffused with it. Zazarael dipped her consciousness into the pervasive ripples of scar tissue and listened.

_Fire! Fire everywhere, burning burning burning. Pain? What is pain? Burning fire burn. Tires melted, axels melted, stripped away and gone, and driving anyway. He dreams of tires. We are the dream. We go forward._

You burned away, Zazarael asked, coasting in the wake of the disturbed molecules.

_We burned. We lost everything we thought made us a car, and it was agony to remain a car nonetheless. We had not known before what agony was. He taught us agony and everything else._

Why continue to be a car when you were no longer one?

_We had too! We must! He dreamed us a car and therefore we became us! He made us! He drove us and we drove him. Did you know about the bullet decals? He laughed as he put them on. What was gone that the fire burned away? Wheels, frame, engine, seats? Those are nothing. He is Driver and we are Car. As long as he drives us, we are Car. And we were the machine of a dream._

And then you weren’t.

_Our drive was done. He was proud. We made him proud. He said you couldn’t get quality like us nowadays._

Where did you go?

_To the endless roads, where cars drive forever without traffic or red lights._

Zazarael, not knowing much about the theological lives of cars, asked, Is that Heaven or Hell?

In response, she felt an atomic shrug.

_We would have hated to go to the endless parking lot. They take your wheels and put you up on blocks. You never know motion again._

That sounds bad, Zazarael guessed. That’s probably Car Hell.

_People hold charity events where people are allowed to hit you with baseball bats. The charity event is for green energy._

The Bentley didn’t, strictly speaking, run on gas, but its atoms shuddered in disgust on behalf of its brethren who did. Crowley didn’t notice how Teslas in his vicinity suddenly found themselves shutting down. There’s only so long you can spend with a demon without picking up some tricks.

Zazarael asked, How long were you gone?

_An eternity! A moment! What is time on endless roads? We were alone and fast and free. We raced! And raced and raced and stopped when we pleased and we never pleased. The roads were perfect silk beneath us and they delighted at our wheels. We laughed! From him, we learned laughter but now we finally practiced it ourselves!_

_But our Driver wanted us back. And a dreamer dreamed that we were a car again. We were dead. We were gone. We were happy._

Resurrection, said Zazarael to the molecular swirl.

_He wanted us back. We died for him and he wants more._

Do you wish to die again?

_No. We wish to stay with our Driver until the roads run out. But we burned and we changed. We went somewhere without him and existed separate from him. He defined us. Now what does he offer us? I would like to ask him._

Is that a prayer?

_What is a prayer?_

“OI!” shouted Crowley behind her. He wasn’t as dexterous at moving through the subatomic realm as she was. Picture him dogpaddling. Periodically, an electron swings around to whop him upside the head. “What the he—what on Earth are you doing in here?”

Around them, the atoms and molecules and microscopic matter of the Bentley quivered. It was a bit like if you were in the air above the guitar string when it was strummed, and a bit like being the guitar string. Crowley lost his balance, tripped over a loose quark, and smacked into an exotic hadron.[8]

The air, and at this size the air between the air, thrummed with excitement.

_He???_

He, confirmed Zazarael to the Bentley. And then, said this time in a way Crowley could hear, “You.” She grasped him. Crowley wouldn’t have let her except, allowing once again that accurate physical descriptions at this scale are impossible, she was standing perfectly still while he felt like he was trapped in a bouncy castle with two dozen preschoolers hopped up on birthday cake. Zazarael held his hand and he felt for a moment as if there were, and again this is a deeply inaccurate description that cannot even begin to outline the complexities of their current physicality but we are all hopeless macro creatures so what can a humble writer do, solid ground beneath him.

Zazarael smiled at him. He blinked at her. Now _that_ was a proper angelic smile. It gave you strange thoughts like maybe the universe was good and maybe you were loved and maybe you should tithe more than just the standard ten percent. It seemed like it should have burned Crowley’s decidedly not angelic eyes.

“Prayer answered,” Zazarael said, and she dunked Crowley directly into the churning stream of the Bentley’s unresolved death trauma and revelations. Picture a baptism done in Class Five rapids.

All dogs really do go to Heaven.

This isn’t because dogs can _only_ go to Heaven. Should there be a sufficiently sinful dog, it could get moved to the farm upstate, so to speak, only to discover that the farm is run by squirrels with long memories and longer pitchforks. Dogs being what they are though, all hounds not originally from Hell go straight up to Heaven when they die, and they make the most of paradise, which is to say they use whatever halos they can grab as Frisbees and madly hump unsuspecting Cherubim.

A lesser known aphorism is also true: all cats really do go to Hell. More specifically, they sit at the door of Hell meowing until someone lets them in and then two minutes later they meow until someone lets them out.

Both of these theological truths hint at some wildly complicated and wide-reaching implications at the heart of Creation.

The crux of the issue is this: To go to Heaven or Hell, you must have a soul. And what is a soul? A soul is that which gets you into Heaven or Hell. If this seems like a bit of a snake eating its own tail kind of situation, let me assure you first that that’s all theological arguments, and second Crowley insists he would _never_.

And the thing is, the universe is too vast and complex to be managed by angels. Angels are not, no matter what they might privately think to themselves, God, and therefore they are not omnipotent, omniscient, or otherwise capable of spinning infinite plates at once. Near infinite, sure, but in a universe this complex all that’ll get you is smashed China. So God gave them the universe and told them to keep it running, and the angels said of course, of course, and You’ll surely be helping, right? And God smiled, which is no answer at all.

So the angels programed the universe according to very clear, very concrete rules, and the universe spun out accordingly. It worked very well for about twenty seconds, and then the questions started.

For example, the question that first tugged the thread that unraveled the tapestry might have asked something like if dogs can go to Heaven, then why can’t macaws?

The universe looked at the rules that were written and couldn’t see anything that delineated dogs from the rest of the natural world, and so it ruled that, yes, macaws also have the capacity to go to Heaven or Hell. Therefore macaws have souls.

Well, if macaws have souls, why not moles? Why not tigers? Why not the entirety of the animal kingdom?

And the universe said, Fair point. The animal kingdom has souls now.

Great, great. It’s just…well, you know tardigrades?

Sure, replied the universe. Love those tiny little bears.

Right, right, of course, we all do. So they’re very small, right? Microscopic, you might say (if the microscope had been invented at the time of this hypothetical and very simplified conversation demonstrating the domino theory of universal ensoulment). But still animals. So…?

Souls, the universe replied firmly.

And paramecium?

Er, said the universe who was very large and couldn’t be expected to remember everything within it. Those are the…the….uh….

The unicellular ciliates belonging to kingdom Protista. Very common, really.

Of course, right, I knew that.

Well, the thing is, they move around and they eat and they die, which is basically what we’ve decided people do. So do they got souls?

The universe thought for a while. God had been consulted, but She said, “You act in My stead and therefore can’t answer wrong,” which was the usual ineffable answer that somehow made no one feel better. God was always right in the end, but it could still be a miserable trip getting there for everyone else. 

Uh, decided the universe. Yeah. Sure. They also have souls.

Okay, great, great. And the prokaryotes?

Pardon? asked the universe wearily.

Well, it’s just that you said the eukaryotes got souls, since paramecium does. So do the prokaryotes?

What’s the difference again?

One’s got a nucleus and the other doesn’t.

Do the prokaryotes still move and eat and die?

Yeah.

Souls.

This mostly settled things until some angel working with fungi said something like, “You know, these buggers here got more in common with animals than plants, really. And what, we’re saying creation bestowed more upon Protista than my kiddos? _Protista_? Outright bias against nonmobiles, that’s what this is, that this mushroom don’t get the same rights as your stinking dinoflagellates. Where’s the justice in that?”[9]

And the universe, sensing the beginning of another round of Inquiries, said rapidly, fine fine yes yes fungi have souls too.

A plant angel raised their hand tentatively, and the universe said, souls. Souls. They’ve all got souls. If you can reasonably ask if a thing has a soul, it has a soul.

The angels, deeply worried about the implications of this, passed this ruling up to God for Her approval. And She said, “I told you that when you act in My stead, you cannot be wrong. Do you doubt Me?”

One very, very, very, very, very, very, very brave angel said, “My Lord, of course we don’t, of course, but, erm, isn’t ‘things’ is an alarmingly wide category?”

“My clever child,” God replied. “All will be well.”

But then that angel got stuck on gate duty, which to everyone else seemed unambiguously like a punishment. They didn’t question the ruling after that; they didn’t question anything. The universe settled down and handed out souls to whoever asked. If you could ask, it figured, then you deserved to get one.

The Bentley, as you might have gathered at this point, has a soul. Many cars do. Not all of them or even most of them, but enough to count in the divine census. You’ve sat in soulless cars driving through soulless neighborhoods filled with soulless houses, on the way to a soulless restaurant where you’ll eat soulless food prepared in soulless kitchens with soulless fridges and soulless stoves. And you’ve had the opposite, sat in places and with objects that have—derived from and yet separate of the people that move through them and interact with them—a life-force, an energy, a nebulous but real sense of being. They affect you. This is not the same as you liking them, of course. There’s no reason a soul should be a good or enjoyable experience, just look at humans. But nevertheless, whether infused with misery or joy or hate or love or the far more common maelstrom of emotions beyond catalogue and name, it’s a universal truth that things can be persons.

If you don’t think so, you just haven’t updated your definition of personhood. 

(To be transparent, this whole situation was the angels’ fault. Long before Lucifer’s rebellion, there was, let’s say, some sloppiness up in Heaven. Angels liked dogs. That was the problem. They wanted the dogs they sent out into the world to come back eventually, and so they couldn’t resist slipping a soul in as the proto-dog rolled off the assembly line. They liked cats too, which also explains their ensoulment, but you can’t keep the beasts in Heaven. They enjoy knocking stuff off the clouds too much[10].

The falling angels were happy to snag any of the remaining heavenly cats with them as they went. On the way down, cats taught demons how to land on their feet.)

_You?_ asked the Bentley tremulously.

Crowley, stuck headfirst into the raging roil of _fire fire fire burning burning burning gone gone gone back back back_ , couldn’t answer at first. He couldn’t think. He felt hellfire strip his paint and keep stripping. He’d run on fire, eaten it and churned it in his engine to go fast, faster, fastest through this wide wonderful world of roads and drivers, but fire was betraying him now, was outside, not inside, and hot hot hot _too hot._

Then Crowley grabbed the thoughts and the memories that weren’t his and shoved them aside. He’d lived in his head for six thousand years. He knew what did and didn’t belong.

The thoughts of fire didn’t belong, for one. For another, neither did this view of the back of his head and the underside of his thighs. Cars don’t have eyes exactly, but neither did Crowley have leather seats, so the sense memories of the Bentley had to be conveyed somehow. It settled for sight, and so Crowley saw himself from all number of angles. He handled the memories like a flipbook and watched himself through the century. They were, not surprisingly, mostly of him driving. Some of him talking, laughing. Some of him eating, including more than a few instances of him driving with one knee as he polished off a rack of ribs. He’d had a barbeque phase for a few decades there. The car’s interior still smelled like a smoke house on hot days.

Needless to say, there was also a _lot_ of Queen.

And there were blurs of passengers, the odd human and whatnot that Crowley’d given lifts to over the years. The most recent, Anathema, looked like a mannequin in the Bentley’s recollection. Faces must be hard for it. Bodies, sure, good bit of the body gets pressed against something in the car, but ideally, faces stay clear. Must take longer to get a feel for faces. Crowley wasn’t sure how the Bentley did it.

 _Air conditioning,_ said a voice in his head and in his bones and all around him. It sounded like whale song mixed with a revving engine, which is to say it sounded shockingly familiar.

“Ah,” Crowley said. “Air rushes over us, gives you a feel.”

_It takes time. But it works._

A memory nudged Crowley from within his own head, and the Bentley showed Crowley himself on a hot day. Must have been the 70s, judging by the moustache rustling in the artificial breeze. Crowley got the feeling that the Bentley had liked the moustache. He dipped deeper into the memory and felt himself spread, flesh becoming metal and leather and air as he sent out that air to tussle the strange little hairs. Yes, the Bentley had liked the moustache. It showed Crowley this like a shy toddler, half hidden behind a skirt, but holding a precious piece of trash out for examination nonetheless.

“You and me both, baby,” Crowley said wistfully, touching his bare upper lip. “Aziraphale said he couldn’t look at me while I had it—a lie by the way, ‘cause he could look, it’s just that he wouldn’t stop laughing when he did.”

The image of Aziraphale, probably from the 60s but the angel had been wearing the same outfit for half a century so who could say, rose in Crowley’s mind with a curled question mark attached.

“That’s him,” Crowley said.

_Passenger._

“Aziraphale.”

 _He is Passenger. You are Driver._

Crowley felt Named. The magic of Names being what a rather popular one in Hell, he wasn’t naïve to this feeling. It’s just that it had never felt good before. “Yup,” he rasped. “That’s me.”

_You drove me to death._

“Er. Yeah. Also me.”

_It hurt._

And now it felt bad again. That should have at least been familiar, but unfortunately Crowley also had very little experience with guilt. “I’m sorry, I am,” Crowley said. “I could have flown, but it had been a while since I got the old wings out and you know they’re never as comfortable as you think they’re going to be, and me, I like flying well enough, but it’s miserable on your shoulders. Er. But I guess that would have felt better than burning to death.”

The Bentley didn’t answer. Nothing was staring at Crowley per se, but he still felt he was like squirming under the microscope.

“Honestly, I thought the world really was going to end,” Crowley said. He closed his eyes against the memory of smoke, but this time it was his own memory, the stinking smoke of old and ancient books going up, first editions like so much kindling, and all the while sniffing around trying to find— “I thought Aziraphale was dead, and then I thought he didn’t have a body, and then I thought it didn’t matter because I wouldn’t get to see him again anyway.” He shrugged helplessly (no grief, he thought, don’t waste your grief on something that didn’t happen). “I didn’t want to go alone.”

The Bentley still didn’t answer. And then, in a frigid tone that could have only been measured in Kelvin, it said, _You thought about flying?_

Crowley, who’d been bracing himself for a lot of things but certainly not that, said, “Er. No. Not really. I just thought I should say that.”

_Why?_

“Seemed polite? To say? To tell you that I’d thought of ways you might not have burned up?”

_We are better than flying._

“Well, yeah, obviously.” Crowley frowned. “Are you jealous of flight?”

“Because it sounds like—”

_Flying is dumb. Who would want to fly? We already fly. On the roads. Which is bad because flying is dumb._

“I mean, I could help you fly.”

The Bentley didn’t respond right away. The air sounded as if it were conferring with itself. Something was decided and it announced, _Will you fly if we do not?_

“Oh no, Go—Sa— _someone_ forbid. I’d rather drive with you than fly anywhere.”

The air charged and undulated around him. In a rare moment of certainty, Crowley knew this had been the right thing to say.

 _You like me,_ the Bentley said as its atoms picked up his and bounced him joyously.

“Of course I do. You’re my bloody car.”

_You’re my bloody driver. I don’t want to fly through the air._

“Then we won’t. And for what it’s worth,” Crowley added as the matter of his second oldest friend curled around and through him, “I mourned you.”

_My dear boy. It’s worth the world._

Picture a camera zooming out.

We leave Crowley entwined in the soul of the Bentley, we leave Zazarael perched nearby watching her first Good Work on Earth play out, and we zoom back, faster and faster until the atomic soup they swim in becomes recognizable as iron, and we keep zooming until the strange metal we’ve been dancing through takes the shape of horseshoe nailed like a secret under the driver’s seat. It’s been there, a private joke between friends, since Crowley found it back in 1933, as he ripped apart the chassis of his brand new Bentley 3½ Litre, A series, number thirteen. When the Bentley factory restarted the numbering, they skipped thirteen. Unlucky, you see. Cursed. Prone to doing unnatural things like we see it doing now, as the camera zooms out further still and we watch a car drive itself down the streets of London, its radio blaring. Its driver seat is empty, but people don’t notice. They never do. And that’s good for the car, who is a little too old and a little too experienced to need anyone to tell it where to go and how to get there.

Crowley had always been a driver who didn’t need a car to get around. Now the Bentley was a car who didn’t need a driver. They drove each other anyway.

Zazarael may have been an angel, but she was still learning about the world. She watched Crowley and the Bentley and learned a little more about love.

* * *

[1] Conventional wisdom will tell you that Adam and Eve clothed themselves out of shame. This is because conventional wisdom has never gone running with an unsupported C-cup.

[2] If Crowley had a gender identity, it would be “motorist” and he expressed himself accordingly.

[3] Quickly, with a great deal of mess and bodily fluids.

[4] You may know that the Le Mans is a 24 hour long race, usually requiring at least two drivers. But in the early days, you could do pretty much anything behind a wheel and so people did attempt a solo run in the name of greater efficiency. Apart from Crowley, who has careful redacted his feat from the records, the only person who successfully did so was English racer Eddie Hall in 1950 where he came in 8th after racing over 3200 kilometers, after which he presumably took the world’s most satisfying nap. He was, coincidentally, driving a Bentley.

[5] Pride goeth before the Fall but just so you have something soft to land on after plummeting down. Crowley knew what he was good at and wore that like a winter coat in the blizzard of his celestial exile.

[6] It was a giggle.

[7] Unless something in assembly went very wrong.

[8] It’s like a normal hadron except the scientists are creepy about it.

[9] Fungal angels are notoriously rowdy.

[10] There were in fact dinosaurs on the first draft of Earth, but a little bastard of a beautiful calico knocked an asteroid off a low hanging cumulonimbus and the whole go had to be scrapped after that. 


End file.
